Wednesday, August 11, 2010

I wear a lot of vintage, but not exclusively, and lately it's been so hot that I don't want to sweat all over my nicest things. So it's been a lot of thrifted and modern stuff, like today's outfit:

Please excuse my crazy hair. Dress is Tulle (super-sale!), pendant is yard-saled, shoes are from Shoes and Chocolate in Baltimore.

I also went thrifting, and found some things that are a little more modern than my usual taste, but I think I'll get some wear out of them. Tips for what to do with the dress are much appreciated-- I'm trying to decide, light- or dark-colored slip underneath? Wear it as a tunic with jeans? Belt or don't?

In other news, I continue to have a huge brain-crush on Dorothy Sayers. For starters, everyone should be as good at naming short stories as she is-- my favorite so far is "The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention," but "The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach" is running a close second.

For another, this woman had a *fascinating* life, the details of which mostly remained secret until after her death. Sayers lived with a man named John Cournos without being married to him for a year, because he claimed not to believe in marriage (which, in the '20s, was kind of a big deal). At the end of the year, Cournos told her he had been testing her devotion and asked her to marry him-- so she left him. She went on to have a child out of wedlock, which was kept from public knowledge until after her death.

In fact, the affair was kept secret too, even though she gave the details to one of her characters-- Harriet Vane, her detective novelist who goes on to marry Lord Peter Wimsey, has a nearly identical affair in her backstory. Frankly, Dorothy Sayers is so awesome that I can forgive a little self-insertion.